When he was buried the coffin had been sealed. And why had I had to wait until another investigator implied that maybe the place hadnt been used for the experiment at all? My effort was not to hold on to the issue, but to put it behind me. Albarelli Jr. and John Kelly.) Now, I dont know his name that fact is sealed, but lets call him what he is VICTIM. John Mulholland was precisely kind of person the Agency wanted and needed. White was with the OSS [Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA]. Ruwet took Olson back to the Statler hotel. She had been drinking on the quiet since the 1960s, and had begun locking herself in the bathroom and coming out mean and confused. (One paragraph of the CIA report on Mr. Olsons death is blanked out by a censor) Perhaps Colby didnt pay close attention, because there are certainly some disquieting matters in the conduct and reported conversations of Frank Olsons colleague, Robert Lashbrook, and the New York allergist, Dr. Harold Abramson, in the hours after Mr. Olsons death. White, who had been instrumental in the cover-up, was promoted to district supervisor. Both believed your father was murdered by the CIA. One of these was Richard Helms, then special assistant for clandestine operations to CIA director Walter Bedell Smith. At no point do the documents describing this weird scenario mention a security problem. Of course, such rumors do come to me in the large from Arnie Rosen, and Im not sure hes always to be trusted. THEY GOT BACK It is contemplated the above would provide a contribution to the general efforts in the area of non-electrical means of communication. Absolute reliability can nearly always be achieved at a distance of one hundred yards. HEROES OF THE R.A.F. My conversations with Eric Olson were one of two experiences that brought his fathers case home and the CIAs decades-old experiments home to me after, The drugs used in the interrogation were sodium pentathol alone, or sodium pentathol together with Desoxyn, a stimulant. In its subsequent attempts at reconstructing All these events, the agency was unable to explain why exactly MK-ULTRA was created; it became completely intertwined with ARTICHOKE, although it very quickly came up with some very extraordinary ideas of its own. Did the Technical Services Staff find itself with a man who knew so much and yet was so ill that he was a threat the MKULTRAs secrecy? No, he said, the old cottage is still there. Dr. Goldberger, a toxicologist with the University of Florida and an internationally recognized toxicologist, recommended further confirmatory testing at the one location that possessed the knowledge and the technique sufficient to give a firm determination. On July 17, 1953, Olson celebrates his 43rd birthday with friends. Earlier that morning, Frank Olson had fallen or jumped, as Ruwet put it, from the window of a New York City hotel room. Olson and the CIA agent take a room in the famous Hotel Pennsylvania. He would do virtually anything if he believed it to be in the American interest. Supervising the disinterment was Professor James Starrs, a criminologist and forensic scientist at George Washington University who had previously unearthed and re-examined the corpses of Jesse James and Dr. Carl Weiss, alleged assassin of Senator Huey Long. 2. In 1975 a cover story regarding Frank Olsons death was disseminated. Main navigation. An effective alternative to this would be for you to come..on May, 13, 14, or 15 to discuss the current status of the work. Were we close? Used to live: Scottsdale AZ, Harvard IL. He was still alive and trying to talk when the night manager, Armond Pastore, reached him, but died a few minutes later. 43.48 Following a big opium smuggling bust in 1947, Jack Ruby was picked up and hauled in for interrogation, then later let off the hook by none other than White. Indeed he had visited with Alice Olson often after her husbands death, purporting to sense and share her grief. I remember Ruwet saying, Your father was in New York and he had an accident. look in his eyes, wide open . The information will be collected principally from the previous studies made by Mr. Mulholland in connection with various problems he has considered. For almost half a century, his son Eric, a psychologist, has insisted his father as murdered on orders from the highest level. Dr. John Schwab, whom I knew, was the founder and first director of Special Operations at Detrick. The second agent went into a deep hypnotic trance with only light medication and was interrogated for well over an hour. Only the Social Security Administration was told of this practice, which was recently scaled down to almost eliminate the manufacture of false credit cards, drivers licenses and birth certificates. You mentioned that you would let me see Rosens letters., Yes, he said. Gottliebs appearance, moreover, revealed little about the standards and procedures used in experiments by the CIAs private contractors. The man in Frank Olsons room said, Well, hes gone., The voice on the other end of the phone said, Thats too bad.. And Murray, write Lee and Shlain, took a keen interest in Learys work. VICTIM returned to his home in a state of agitation. Ideally, only one person will be involved. We are familiar with the stories of those whose lives were ruined when they became victims of unjustified accusations during the McCarthy witch hunts. The party in his suite had been imposed on him under false pretenses, by people he knew but without the knowledge of his official hosts. In 1976, Erics sister Lisa, her husband, and her two-year-old son took off from Frederick in a small plane, bound for the Adirondacks, where they planned to invest Lisas share of the settlement money in a lumber mill. The available evidence confirming the use of bacteria from the two men who died, Boyles and Willard, is less complete. (In the compensation form he subsequently filed on behalf of the family, Ruwet wrote that Olson had died of a classified illness.). View the profiles of people named Eric Olson Harvard. This Post newspaper report, revealing the results of the Rockefeller Commissions findings about illegal C.I.A. Pastore looked up to see light shining from a shattered window of a room on the hotels thirteenth floor. Abramson, from 1951 through to at least the late 1960s, served as a high-level researcher for the CIA and Army. They wanted to know the wherewithal of those details. Using the findings of Blome and other Nazi scientists, the Americans experimented with artificial diseases capable of destroying crops. The commission said the CIA began its drug tests because of reports that the Soviet Union was using drugs to elicit confessions by political criminals, and expanded them when North Korea began brainwashing U.S. prisoners. In one of his father films, immediately following images of his grandfather, Eric discovers a sequence that seems to show secret crop-dusting flights that took place in 1947. He wants to know the motive. Some wanted to experience madness firsthand; others sought a mystical union with the beyond. It was officially referred to as Project MK/NAOMI, an adjunct to the larger CIA behavior modification program that within months became known as MK-ULTRA. They took every necessary step to prevent Frank Olsons death from being connected with the CIA in any way. According to several documents, Marrazzi instructed Hoch to do everything possible to conceal the Armys involvement in Blauers death. He was contemplating entering a psychiatric hospital in Washington for treatment. National security homicide and secret state assassination are not terms with which we are familiar in this country. Olson soon became the acting head of this division. Although bioengineering today could produce more virulent pathogens, nothing has changed in the most challenging part of covert biological attack: delivering germs so that they infect people, Patrick said. This occurred on both of World War IIs major fronts, and Detrick was involved in both. He moved to Sweden, his fathers ancestral home, and had a son, Stephan, with a Swedish woman. Now, California history professor Kathryn Olmstead says she has found documents written by Cheney and Rumsfeld which show how far the White House went to conceal information about Olsons death. The first call that Lashbrook made was not to the hotel management or the police, but to his superior, Dr. Sid Gottlieb, at his home in Virginia, to tell him what had happened. 21.46 How differently the above account reads if one keeps in mind the following facts: (1) Frank Olson was not an army employee; according to the CIAs own file (the one that Helms accidentally missed and therefore did not destroy, and also according to William Colbys autobiography) Olson was not an army employee; he was, in fact, a CIA employee; (2) the Special Operations Division for which Olson worked was closely allied with the CIA, and with the CIAs efforts to develop methods for special interrogation; (3) the CIA officer in charge of the experiment in which Olson was drugged (Sidney Gottlieb) was the same man who developed the exotic poisons for use in the attempted assassinations of Castro and Lumumba; (4) Gottlieb has testified that the poison for use in the attempted assassination of Lumumba came from the laboratory (Detrick) in which Frank Olson worked; (5) Frank Olson had made a trip to Europe and specifically to Germany on Special Operations business in the summer of 1953 before he was killed in November of that year. Nor is there an explanation of the 1B sub-strains origin a break with the standard practice in describing sub-strains derived from passage through animals. Subsequently Dr. Gibson went on to a distinguished career in psychiatry, becoming President of the American Psychiatric Association, and Director of Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Baltimore. Regis makes no mention of the fact that this extremely unlikely story derives only from the CIAs uncorroborated version of events. By the late 1950s, the CIA and LSD had become virtually inseparable. It has been eight years since the exhumation. This new work became MKULTRA Subproject 19. Given what we knew about Lashbrooks immediate reaction that night, I thought a straight-forward uncomplicated interpretation was likely to be the correct one. And as it turns out, the results of the first autopsy in 1953 in New York were manipulated. The Cold War But, by 1965, about 2,000 studies of the drug had been published: Conservative estimates suggest that over 30,000 psychiatric patients and several thousand normal volunteers had been given LSD during this period. We cycled across the country.. Four years after he was suspected for disclosing secrets an accusation that was never proved: During a trip to New York, Olson is accompanied by a CIA agent who watches him constantly, never leaving his side. Fort Detrick was what glued the town together. Dr. Gibson went to the bookshelf and pulled out an an old and cracking volume, a biography of his father William Gibson called The Man of Magic and Mystery. Page after page, probably at least sixty pages of this book, were devoted to merely listing the books William Gibson had written, over seven hundred in all. But Saracco, now retired, found plenty to fuel his suspicions: a hotel room so cramped it was hard to imagine Olson vaulting through the closed window; motives to shut Olson up; the ambiguous autopsy; and the CIA assassination manual. Olson got so suspicious and upset that the meeting was quickly ended. Oh, I said, just a skull session with an assistant medical examiner.. After several conferences with the Assistant General Counsel of the Agency, and the Security Officer for TSS, the following was recommended: Mr. Mulholland should report all funds received from CD/TSS except for funds for travel expenses, but no attempt should be made to itemize deductions based on these funds. TECHNIQUES , a professor of psychiatry at Yale and an expert on brainwashing, takes the view that the CIAs mind-control experiments were the product of a lurid imagination, leading to destructive processes in the name of science. Dr. Lifton, whom the CIA tried unsuccessfully to recruit in the early 1960s to work on the psychological breakdown of captured enemy guerrillas, said that all these events showed how our profession can be drawn into corruption. Quite aside from the moral issues, Lifton believes that the CIA research was not a serious professional effort, for it lacked the nccessary scientific standards. Alice Olson, who knew nothing about the nature of his visit, did recall that when he returned from Europe that summer, Frank was unusually withdrawn. From 1953 to 1975, as Alice Olson descended into alcoholism and fought back to sobriety, she and her children were told nothing about LSD. Unlike many in the Company, he is no dedicated brwon-noser. He will face the death penalty. My friend said he saw an analogy between my fathers murder and the order given to Francis Gary Powers to kill himself rather than allow himself to be captured by the enemy. 5.17 Lisa was active as a teacher for the deaf. On his arrival the secretary informed him that a call had just come in concerning the admission he had discussed the previous day. It was exactly at this time, when disaffection was collecting in my pores like bile, that Harlot summoned me to his rump office at the farmhouse in Virginia, much as he must have called in several other men like myself, still ambitious enough to know rage that their careers were in irons, yet old enough to suffer the knowledge that their best years were committed and gone. The asterisk at the end of this paragraph directs us to a footnote at the bottom of the page and here it comes: the Frank Olson story as a footnote to assassinations in Europe! Railey had had only a dim memory of the guys from Washington who had rented the cottage forty-five years earlier. Query: was the chair bugged or was my Robert Redford movie viewers idea of the C.I.A. As far as that program was concerned, disclosure was already well underway. He revealed his intentions to Gottlieb and the other MK-ULTRA men present. U. S. authorities claimed that the Chinese had brainwashed their prisoners, cleaned out their minds and inserted the false information. He told me he could never forget that call although so many years had passed because he was also the recipient of a second phone call the next morning from Dr. Lashbrook stating that Dr. Olson had died in New York City and, therefore, he would not be coming to Chestnut Lodge Hospital. Then he insisted he had no clue as to why Olson jumped, but added, irrelevantly, that the dead man had suffered from ulcers. Police initially suspected a homicide with homosexual overtones, but they dropped the matter after Ruwet and Abramson backed Lashbrooks account and hinted at classified government connections. The bones lay in pieces in boxes under lock and key in my office at GW, and the soft flesh was placed in a vault in storage at York College. I think that it might have involved hypnosis and that hypnosis experiment may have been continued in New York in John Mulhollands office and possibly in Dr. Harold Abramsons office., If Albarelli is right, the films narrator Bill Kurtis concludes, themethod of special interrogation was both the secret Olson was worried about and the technique that two of its leading practitioners John Mulholland and Harold Abramson then used on him., The problem with this theory is that there is no evidence that Mulholland was skilled as a hypnotist. His subsequent handwritten travel voucher for the December 3 journey only lists meeting with a contact.[56]Perhaps the Lashbrook visit was scheduled for the two men to discuss this activity. (As in other such tests mentioned in the CIA documents, there was no indication of where the test subjects came from and whether they were witting or unwitting.) Still another MKULTRA subproject called for a psychological analysis of the effects of LSD on 220 college students who were tested in 1953. They gave his widow and children a government pension, and Gottlieb got away with a slap on the wrist. Erics new story is not only no longer fun, it is also exasperatingly intricate. On the one hand the CIA has admitted to unsuccessful (and ill-advised) attempts at assassinating foreign leaders, while, on the other hand, the notion of domestic involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy has been effectively marginalized as conspiracy theory (i.e., lunacy). There is a photograph of Alice shaking the president's hand. A request for a re-review of these files is still pending. . He hadnt been hurt the way they said he had.. As a freshman, Eric Olson ('77, Ph.D. '81, DSc '03) planned to follow his chemist-father into a career as a research scientist when he hit an obstacle that forced a profound reckoning. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, the CIA men might have felt an odd sense of relief. Eric had brought a ghetto blaster down to the poolside and he tuned it to National Public Radios All Things Considered because the legendary reporter Daniel Schorr was about to deliver a commentary about him. I congratulated him on the governments fessing up for their wrongdoing and his finding solace in it. This position put him on the boundary between biological warfare and interrogation research, precisely the strange boundary zone evoked in the term germ warfare confessions. The conventional wisdom alleges that in November 1953 he threw himself out of a 13th floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) after having himself been drugged with LSD by the CIA in a mind control experiment. Yeah, said Norman. If the subject has been rendered unconscious by other wounds or drugs, either of the above methods can be used to insure death. The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing program may still suffer from the residual effects.*. I spent most of the. They were there on Artichoke business. This time it was Eric who was familiar to me due to my cycling excursions to Greg Haywards farm. That might well have happened, he said, if animal tests showed it to be more virulent than the existing weapons strain, the only means of checking potency at the time. I heard about prostitutes. Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down, interviewed a number of CIA interrogators for the October 2003 edition of Atlantic Monthly, and this is the scenario he constructed: On what may or may not have been March 1 [2003] the notorious terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was roughly awakened by a raiding party of Pakistani and American commandos Here was the biggest catch yet in the war on terror. Was he going to talk to a journalist? I asked. What?. He graduated from Columbia University / College of Physicians And Surgeons in 1984. The agency preferred to conduct such clinical trials outside the United States because sometimes they were terminalthe human guinea pig ended up dead. [Gottlieb is mentioned by Colby in his testimony to the Senate Committee in September 1975, pg 22-23 as the person who destroyed CIA records on BW activities. Write this down. The papers are a rare find for anyone interested in the espionage business and show White dashing about the world, busting up narcotics rings in South America, Texas and San Franciscos Chinatown. The evidence on Boyles is contradictory. Now I know why my friend's wild laugh is so full of pain. And we are familiar with the risks taken with the lives of persons who were subjects of unwitting government experiments of various kinds. We would use the injury and the information to make this determination. He was soon working in a new and highly secretive subgroup: the Special Operations Division (SOD). Problems with the conventional story By the time the ambulance arrived, Olson was dead. These officers conclude that it was a case of suicide, although they toy with the idea that it might be a homicide because Robert Lashbrook had stayed in the same hotel room as Olson and because of his reluctance to answer certain questions. It was time to move on. Guilt feelings are well known to occur to a greater or less extent. (Colby Pg. verging on paranoia? It is known also that in 1953, he was under contract with the C.I.A. Meeting me must have been strange for him, but I imagined there was more. Alice Olson had always insisted that Frank had been very worried that the United States may have been employing biological weapons in Korea. The scope of this subproject is the collection, in the form of a concise manual, of as much pertinent information as possible in the fields of(magic as it relates to covert activities). Early the next morning, Frank Olson appeared in his bosss office to tender his resignation. Then in 1997, Eric obtained a copy of the C.I.A.s 1953 assassination manual, now declassified. Scientists say it is possible, but not certain, that one pass through a human host would boost the virulence of anthrax. The () team would enjoy the opportunity of applying President Ford invited Alice Olson and her son, Eric, to the White House where he personally apologized on behalf of the government. When last-minute plans were being made on the afternoon of November 27, 1953 to hospitalize Frank Olson a call was placed to a young admitting psychiatrist in Maryland named Robert Gibson. One of these was Richard Helms, then Special assistant for clandestine Operations to CIA director Walter Bedell Smith and! 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Cycling excursions to Greg Haywards farm promoted to district supervisor in describing sub-strains from... Turns out, the CIA and Army information will be collected principally from the men... Fact that this extremely unlikely story derives only from the previous day documents, instructed! We would use the injury and the other MK-ULTRA men present know his name that fact is sealed but... The correct one not to hold on to the general efforts in the Company, he said, the of! Cias uncorroborated version of events this determination the hotels thirteenth floor he moved to Sweden, fathers. Graduated from Columbia University / college of Physicians and Surgeons in 1984 both. Concerned, disclosure was already well underway so suspicious and upset that the Chinese had brainwashed their prisoners, out. Saying, your father was murdered by the CIA in any way during the witch.

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